HBO Saturday premieres are usually the province of big-budget blockbusters starring major movies stars. You’ll flock to them if you either missed them in theaters or want to see them again. Rarely are HBO Saturday nights used to surface movies that slipped below the radar, but luckily that’s exactly what’s happening this week with Patti Cake$, the debut feature from writer/director Geremy Jasper. A Sundance 2017 hit that made its way into theaters last year, Patti Cake$ got great reviews and a little bit of attention, but it deserves the big audience that HBO can bring to it, and that goes double for its two main stars.

Patricia (Danielle Macdonald) is a young woman in workaday New Jersey, struggling to find work and help her mom make ends meet so they can take care of Patti’s Nana (Cathy Moriarty), who’s old and sick. It’s a setup that becomes even more familiar as we see that Patti dreams of becoming a boss-ass MC. She’s a kid with a dream that will one day hopefully lift her out of the muck of her own life, and in her mind’s eye, she’s already seeing herself as a star.

Patti’s got talent, which is good, but also plenty of reasons to doubt herself. The neighborhood shitheads call her “Dumbo” because she’s big and her last name is Dombrowski. She tends to freeze up whenever she and her partner in rhyme — Jheri (Siddharth Dhananjay), who works at the drug store —step up for a performance. But she’s got a spark to her, and when she and Jheri partner up with Basterd (Mamoudou Athie), that spark creates some flames. Like all great movies about artists, there’s a charge up there on the screen when “PB&J” are working out their first collaboration.

Meanwhile, Patti’s home life features a fraught relationship with her mom, Barb (Bridget Everett). Barb’s song is much the same as many of the moms in stories like these: she got married too young, her life ruined by the kid who’s now all grown up and trying not to make the same mistakes. In this case, Barb used to sing in a hard rock band, so she’s got some dreams deferred of her own.

It’s a familiar tale that Patti Cake$ is telling, but it does a good job of keeping out of the ruts. For one thing, it resists the temptation to turn the misery of Patti’s life up to eleven. Her mom can be mean or insensitive, but she’s no monster. Her circumstances are limited but she’s not scraping by in some hell on Earth. What that does is it gives the story room to maneuver, because it gives Patti room to fail. In a more fraught movie, the protagonist can’t well fall short or else we’d all go home and kill ourselves. By giving Patti the room to fail without the audience rioting, it actually gives the question of whether she and her rap career are going to make it some uncertainty.

Best of all, though, Patti Cake$ delivers a platform for Danielle Macdonald and Bridget Everett to show their superstar talent. Macdonald previously starred opposite Dakota Fanning in the drama Every Secret Thing, revealing surprising depth and darkness in a performance opposite an actress so formidable. Here, she’s hugely appealing and incredibly charismatic. Her performances are calibrated to make her seem talented but not unrealistically so. We believe in the promise with her.

Bridget Everett, meanwhile, has been a superstar on the NYC cabaret circuit for years, but recently, she’s been given some great opportunities to show the breadth of her talent. Amazon unwisely passed on the pilot for her comedy Love You More, but between that and the performance she gives here — playing a frustrated, regretful, but loving mother — she should be getting many more opportunities to shine.

That Jasper was wise enough to incorporate Everett’s incomparable musical skills into the story was not only smart, it helped his film build up to one of the most surprisingly emotional crescendos of any recent film. This one is definitely worth your time.